The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job vacancies, and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena? What...

I study the cyclical behavior of an equilibrium search model with endogenous job creation and destruction, with focus on the model's failure to match the observed cyclical volatility of unemployment. Job creation in the model is influenced by wages in new matches. I summarize microeconometric...

It is increasingly recognized that labour markets are pervasively imperfectly competitive, that there are rents to the employment relationship for both worker and employer. This chapter considers why it is sensible to think of labour markets as imperfectly competitive, reviews estimates on the...

Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some failures in accounting for the data. This paper aims to answer two questions: (i) Does the model fit the data, and,...

We show that worker wellbeing is not only related to the amount of compensation workers receive but also how they receive it. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been pre-occupied with individual performance-related pay, we here demonstrate a robust positive link between the...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

The proportion of capacity-constrained firms in European economies remains today fairly small, which suggests that capacity shortages cannot be the direct and single cause of unemployment persistence. Inferring from this observation that low investment rates play no role in explaining the...

This paper reexamines the existence of a long-run relationship between wages and unemployment in the U.K., with data over the period 1860-1913 used by A.W. Phillips to derive the well-known Phillips Curve. Using Johansen's maximum likelihood method of testing for cointegration, a long-run...

This article argues in favor of drawing a distinction between the concepts of labour rationing and unemployment, the former referring to the occurrence of excess supply in a given labour market, the latter to job-waiting activity. In a first part, the literature on the possible consequences of...

We present an efficiency wage model in which workers' effort depends on the level and on the growth rate of their wage relative to an alternative wage. Using data for four countries (US, UK, FR, GY), the implications of the model are examined and are found to be in accordance with the...